Coming to America: Chapter 7 AND 8!!!

Chapter 7 and 8-Coming to America

During the years 1880-1920, 4.1 Italians had immigrated to the U.S. Italians certainly tended to return back to their home country after saving up a good amount of money and getting what they wanted from here and then coming back to the U.S after a certain amount of years. They also did temporary migration to other countries and experienced it beforehand coming to the United States. Most of the Italians coming in were skilled artisans as well as many intellectuals coming in which is very surprising because as I have been reading the past couple of chapters, immigrants usually come in with no money, education or skills and build it once they are working here with the belief that anything is possible in America. Italian painters and sculptors also contributed to plastic art (which I studied in Art History course and is pretty cool). Immigrants were pretty smart and had introduced new crops and techniques since they were doing agriculture in California! Priests and political exiles also came to America along with many intellectual people of Italy. The majority of them were doing manual labor though and most were Catholics. I’ve actually never heard of this term, padroni was known as finding jobs through ethnic labor contractors, which I can imagine is a lot easier for them. Some were poor due to the low wages they earned and poor neighborhoods they resided in. They lived in many bad neighborhoods and that is probably the reason why many of them are involved in crimes.  According to some people…crime is a means to upward social mobility which is very disheartening and frightening to read that people think that only crime will solve their social and economic issues and status within American society. For the Arabs, I definitely agreed with Rogers on the point being made that many think the term Arab means Muslim when it really doesn’t because there are indeed Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. I hadn’t known that a great portion of Arabs were immigrating into New York City mainly. Some were fortunate to open their own businesses while others were Arab peddlers. I was very shocked to learn that only two mosques were open before the 1930s! Today, we have hundreds if not thousands of mosques built all over the United States as well as pretty much every country in the world!  Many Armenians do in fact live in Fresno to this day. I was very surprised to learn that 26 different European ethnic groups immigrated into the U.S…there’s a lot of multiculturalism as one could tell. They settled in states near factories and manufacturing at the time. These were people to whom things happened instead of people who caused things to happen according to an author, which I can certainly agree with. All Poles who came here spoke Polish as a mother tongue and were Roman Catholics. They settled into cities with economic motives. Eastern European Jews seriously insisted on staying in the U.S which is not surprising for me because once people adjust and be comfortable with American society, they tend to stay longer and not want to go back to the issues they were facing. I was in dismay while I read the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire in 1911!!! I can’t even imagine witnessing people doing that or doing that myself, it’s so absurd!